8

DECONSTRUCTION
Deconstruction's admirers see it as a way that begins to let
us question the presuppositions of the language we think in.
Its detractors condemn its subtle and convoluted readings as
narcissistic self-reflexivity.
SHIRLEY F. STATON
The term deconstruction sends many readers running for cover, partly because it is
one of the most radical approaches to reading that has appeared on the scene, but also
because its terminology presents difficulties of its own. Why, then, does anyone want
to understand it or use it to read a poem or story? Perhaps the best answer is that
it provides a way of playing with language and meaning that teases and delights.
It is not a methodology or school or even a philosophy. Instead, it is, says its founder
Jacques Derrida, a strategy, some "rules for reading, interpretation and writing."
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Deconstruction is the best-known (and most significant) form of literary criticism
known as poststructuralism, and in fact many people use the terms interchange-
ably. To understand the revolution that poststructuralism has created in literary criti-
cism, it is necessary to look at some of its predecessors, both structuralism-the
movement that it both incorporates and undermines-and those that structuralismit-
self challenged.
The revolutionary nature of deconstruction can be summarized by saying that in
general it challenges the way Western civilization has conceived of the world since
Plato. More specifically, it overturns the principles that have provided basic beliefs
about truth and meaning since the eighteenth-century French philosopher, scientist,
and mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650) applied the rational, inductive
methods of science to philosophy. Refusing to accept the truth of anything without
grounds for believing it to be true, he began with the one thing he could know, that
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 139
consciousness of his thinking proved his own existence. "Cogito, ergo sum," he de-
clared. "I think, therefore I am." From that one certainty all other knowledge could
proceed. The Cartesian approach, which elevated the importance of reason over pas-
sion, superstition, and imagination as a means of finding truth in the natural world,
has had an impact well beyond the eighteenth century. It has helped shape the think-
ing of humanists, artists, and philosophers into the twenty-first century, providing
them with the conviction that they could make a better world. If meaning and truth
could be found by thinking and acting rationally, humankind could solve social prob-
lems, cure illnesses, and create new technologies. In short, through the use of reason
progress was possible, perhaps inevitable.
The confidence inspired by such a worldview came into question toward the end
of the nineteenth century with a radical revisioning of "reality" that took place in a
wide variety of disciplines. The long-held view of the world as a knowable, objective
entity that could be discovered through direct experience of the senses encountered
serious challenges in fields as diverse as physics, linguistics, anthropology, and psy-
chology. In philosophy, for example, thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-
1900) began to question the existence of objective truth. Nietzsche even announced
the death of God. Believing that traditional values had lost their influence over peo-
ple, he called for the creation of new values that could replace them. He foresaw a
"superman" who was strong and independent, freed from all values except those he
deemed to be valid. Using different terminology, spokespersons from other areas
of study echoed his denial of an ultimate reality that is static, unified, and absolute,
to be replaced by an understanding of the world as relativistic, dynamic, and open. In
1905, for example, Albert Einstein published a paper that would change scientists'
understanding of time, space, and reality. His ideas about the velocity of light chal-
lenged the assumption that there is such a thing as time that all clocks measure. In
other words, the concept of absolute time was replaced with time as relevant to mo-
tion. Such thinking represented a fundamental shift in the way we see ourselves and
our world. Later it would lead to questions about the nature of human behavior, be-
lief, and morality. "Is everything relative?" the twentieth century would ask.
The study of language was not immune from such probing. For two hundred
years, language had been viewed as a transparent medium through which reality
could be set down and shaped into an aesthetic form. Finding meaning, which was
assumed to be present, required finding the words that corresponded to objects
perceived. Literature was taken to be mimetic, reflecting and presenting truths about
life and the human condition. Because texts depicted life in a poweIful way, they were
thought to have a J4fe of their own that could be discovered and analyzed. Enter
the critic, whose job was to reveal their value and meaning. For example, the formal-
ists (the New Critics, as distinguished from the Russian formalists), who carried the
nineteenth-century empirical worldview into the twentieth century, saw a poem as
a self-sufficient object possessing unity and form, operating within its own rules
to resolve ambiguities, ironies, and paradoxes (see chapter 3). They sought to deter-
mine not what the poem means but how it means. There was no doubt that with the
application of intellectual analysis, an understanding of form would lead to meaning.
\
CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 141
Although an occasional doubter complained about the cold, unemotional nature of
the close readings of the form<\lists, there was no uncertainty about the presence of
ultimate meaning.
The power of the formalists, and their nineteenth-century heritage, began to
break down in literary criticism with the appearance of the phenomenological crit.
ics, who rejected the formalists' inability (or unwillingness) to question how readers
know a literary work, as exemplified by their refusal to investigate the author's in-
tentions. The phenomenologists, who believe that meaning resides not in physical ob-
jects but in human consciousness as the object is registered in it, emphasize the reader
in making literature (see chapter 7). Instead of a single best reading of a text, they ac-
cept the possibility of many readings, because a text cannot exist separate from the
individual mind that perceives it. It cannot be explained as something unto itself; in-
stead, it can be explained as an effect on a reader, and that effect will be different for
each reader because of the experiences each brings to the reading. In addition, read-
ers are called upon to supply missing material, to fill in textual gaps. They will do so
using their own experience with literature and life, thereby creating even more dif-
in interpretations. In other words, as in other fields, it is no longer a given in
lIterature that tmth is static, absolute, and unified. Now it is deemed to be relative, dy-
namic, and open.
From the early part of the twentieth century came another set of ideas that was
to have a significant impact on how people understand the world. Called stmctural-
ism, it is, in its broadest sense, a science that seeks to understand how systems work.
Those who practice it are not so much interested in the operations (or aesthetics or
meaning) of a single entity as they are in trying to describe the underlying (and not
necessarily visible) principles by which it exists. Assuming that individual character-
that can be noted on the surface are rooted in some general organization, stmc-
turahsts collect observable information about an item or practice in order to discover
the laws that govern it. For example, a stmcturalist studying urban American archi-
tecture of the twentieth century will be interested in the characteristics of a single
building only insofar as they provide data that help define the bigger category of ar-
objects to which that building belongs. A structural anthropologist may
examme the customs and rituals of a single group of people in some remote part of
the world not simply to understand themin particular but to discover underlying simi-
larities between their society and others. Because behaviors that on the surface appear
to be vastly different from each other may beneath that surface have commonalities
that link the human beings that practice them, observations of concrete local phenom-
ena allow the researcher to support assumptions about human society that cross cul-
tural boundaries. Claude Levy-Strauss, for example, found the mythologies of various
cultures often to be only different versions of the same narrative. Their basic similari-
ties of stmcture, which he called mythemes, he judged to be reflective of human
concerns that are not culturally bound. In short, stmcturalists are looking not for
stmctures in a physical sense but for patterns that underlie human behavior, experi-
ence, and creation.
A critical question has to do with the source of the stmctures themselves. Tradi-
tionally it has been assumed that they resided in the physical world. Human beings
found meaning in what they perceived outside themselves. However, the stmctural-
ists argue from a different direction. According to them, stmcture comes from the hu-
man mind as it works to make sense of its world. Any given experience, they say, is
so full of information that it would be overwhelming if there were no way of order-
ing it. The mind's defense is to sort and classify, make mles of process-that is, cre-
ate a structure. It is such conceptual systems that make it possible for individuals to
distinguish one type of object from another or to differentiate among members of the
same category. This fairly radical idea placed meaning in the mind of human beings,
not in external, objective reality. It is a short step from there to the idea that language,
not sense experience or modes of consciousness, shapes who we are, what we think,
what we understand reality to be.
When the stmcturalist approach was applied to language, it caused a significant
departure from the traditional methods of study practiced by nineteenth-century phi-
lologists, who had examined language diachronically, that is, by tracing how words
evolved in meaning or sound over time. The philologists compared the changes they
found with those that had occurred in other languages and looked for causes. Their
work assumed that language was mimetic, not a system with its own governing mles
but one that reflected the world. A word, to them, was a symbol that was equal to the
object or concept it represented. In contrast, Frenchlinguist Ferdinand de Saussure, to-
day generally regarded as the father of modern linguistics, began to use a
approach, looking at a language at one particular time in search of the prinCIples that
govern its functions, principles of which its users might not even be consciously
aware. His studies led him to reject the idea that language is simply a tool to be used
to represent a preexistent reality. That is, he did not accept the idea that it is mimetic
or transparent. Instead, he argued that language is a system that has its own mles of
operations. He called those generalmles langue and referred to the applications that
members of a particular speech community make of them in their iterations as pa-
role. In other words, langue, sometimes referred to as a grammar, is the system within
which individual verbalizations have meaning, and parole refers to the individual ver-
balizations. The rules of langue, which the individual speaker absorbs as a member
of a culture, are manifested in parole. In his efforts to identify and explain how all
this works, Saussure swept away the correspondence model be-
tween words and things and gave us language that is connected only conventionally
and arbitrarily to the world outside it.
One of the concepts important to Saussure's explanation of the language system
is that of signs, which he describes as composed of two parts: a written or sound con-
stmction, known as the signifier, and its meaning, called the signified. The spoken or
written form of hat, for example, is a signifier. The concept that flashes into your
mind when you hear or read it is the signified. With the introduction of these terms,
and the theory underlying them, Saussure transformed the sense of what a word is.
He made it no longer possible to speak of a word as a symbol that represents a thing
PRACTICING DECONSTRUCTION
Working from the \l,ssumption that language is inherently ambiguous, not the cl.ear,
efficient communicator that we would like to think it is\ deconstruction recogmzes
that any human utterance has a multitude of possibilities for meaning. The simpl.est
statement may be heard in a wide variety of ways, giving it a tendency to undermme
itself by refuting what it appears to be saying. It contradicts itself as it moves from
one meaning to another. How does this happen?
In deconstructive terms, Saussure's sign, the combination of a signifier and a
signified that refers to a mental concept, is not a stable, unchanging entity. Using his
form a new understanding of reality, their interpretations of texts are too static and
unchanging. They produce readings that posit fixed meanings. In the post-
structuralists view texts as fluid, dynamic entities that are given newlIfe With repeated
readings and through interactions with other texts, thereby providing an plu-
rality of meanings. Where the structuralists had provided a broadly applIcable new
method of arriving at meaning through an analysis of underlying codes and rules, de-
construction declared meaning to be essentially undecidable. What a text means and
how it means, they said, cannot be determined because it is not possible to system-
atically find the grammar of a text. Instead, one can find many meanings in a. single
text, all of them possible and all of them replaceable by others. Instead of for
structure, then, deconstruction looks for those places where texts contradIct, and
thereby deconstruct, themselves. Instead of showing how the conventions of a text
work it shows how they falter. The result is that a literary work can no longer have
one meaning that an authority (critic or author) can Instead,
meaning is accepted to be the outgrowth of various signifying systems withm the text
that may even produce contradictory meanings. .'. .
In the 1970s, deconsttuction became a major influence on lIterary cnticism
in large part because of the strong influence of its originator and namer, the
pher Jacques Derrida, whose major precursors were Friedrich Nietzsche and Martm
Heidegger, known for their probing of such key concepts as knowledge, and
identity. In the United States, deconstruction became closely associated WIth Yale
University because some of its better-known advocates were on the faculty there. In
fact, in people's minds deconstruction remains closely associated with (and is some-
times referred to as) the Yale school of criticism.
The impact of deconstruction has not been welcomed by all some of
whom object that it robs literature of its significance, trivializes texts as SImple word-
play, and presents itself in unintelligible jargon. Humanists see it as a between
literature and life, even as a practice that shuts out ordinary readers unwIllmg to en-
gage in the complex theorizing that deconstruction requires. In response, its
ers point out that it gives us a way to read more critically hones.tly than
systems have allowed us to do. It also provides means of discovenng prenuses and
ideologies that lurk unacknowledged in the language we use.
143 PRACTICING DECONSTRUCTION CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION
outside it, as it had conventionally been known. Because a signifier does not refer to
some object in the world but to a concept in the mind, it is language, not the world
external to us, that mediates our reality. We see only what it allows us to see both out-
side and ourselves. It structures our experience. Consider, for example, how
speakers of different languages tend to have differing views of the world. They see
the world through different structures.
The connection between the signifier and signified has several important char-
First. of all, it is not a natural relationship but an arbitrary one. The sig-
mfier hat has no mherent link with the physical object you wear on your head. It could
just as easily have been called a rose or a bed. Then how do a signifier and a signified
become tied together? The relationship comes about through convention, an agree-
ment on the part of speakers that the two are associated. Finally, we know one sign
fl:om another not because of meanings they inherently carry but because of the
differences among them. The signifier bat is distinguishable from hat, for example,
because they have different initial letters. Language, then, is arbitrary, conventional,
and based on difference.
The concept of difference has additional ramifications that become important in
theory. This concept appears most clearly as opposites, which struc-
turalIsts and others refer to as binary oppositions. They are contrasting concepts
such as male/female, right/left, day/night, each of which makes it possible for us to
understand the other more fully. We are able to understand black because we under-
stand white, noise because we know silence.
Although structuralism has taken varied forms in different countries, the most
influential theorists have been the French followers of Saussure. His ideas, and theirs,
have been adopted and adapted by many disciplines besides linguistics. After all,
is social behavior, there is likely to be a sign system, not necessarily
one mvolvmg words. Saussure, in fact, proposed the development of a science called
semiology that would investigate meaning through signs observable in cultural phe-
nomena. Because language is the primary signifying system, it would be the chief fo-
of study, and research into other systems would follow the model used in studying
It. the time in this couJ;1try Charles Sanders Pierce was developing semiotics,
structuralist principles to the study of sign systems and the way mean-
mg IS denved from them. The point is the same: to treat all forms of social behavior
as signifying systems that are defined by the structure of their interrelationships. The
process provides anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others with a way
to go beneath external facts in order to examine the nature of the human experience.
It has proved to be valuable in studying phenomena as disparate as Barbie dolls and
the mythologies of little-known cultures.
Deconstruction, a product of the late 1960s, took structuralist ideas about the na-
ture of the sign, the importance of difference and binary oppositions, and the role of
lang.uage in mediating experience and extended them, sometimes in ways that con-
tradicted the theories of the structuralists. It both built on and broke with structural-
ism, making deconstruction one of several poststructuralist theories that find their
commonality in the idea that although some structuralist principles can be used to
about that work in isolation. The meaning of any given text will be derived from its
interrelatedness with other texts, in an ongoing process that gives it a series of pos-
sible meanings and readings.
Many people are made uncomfortable by the absence of a stable meaning. When
they realize the extended consequences of such a proposition, they are likely to be
even more disquieted, for if meaning is derived from what is not there-absence-
and it is in the end undecidable, then there is no such thing as objective truth. As Der-
rida explains it, there is no transcendental signified, no ultimate reality or end to all
the references from one sign to another, no unifying element to all things. Human
beings resist an existence that lacks the certainty of unchanging meaning, a fixed
center, because, as Derrida points out, humankind, at least in the Western world, is
logocentric; that is, human beings want to believe that there is a centering principle
in which all belief and actions are grounded and that certain metaphysical ideas are
to be favored over others. They want to believe that there is a presence behind lan-
guage and text. Throughout history such a center has been given many names: truth,
God, Platonic Form, or essence. The salient characteristic, regardless of the name, is
that each is stable and ongoing. Each provides an absolute from which all knowledge
proceeds.
Actually, this type of thinking goes back to Aristotle, who declared that some-
thing cannot have a property and not have it, leading to the dualistic thinking charac-
teristic of Western civilization. Such reasoning is most apparent in the tendency of
Western metaphysics to see the world in terms of pairs of opposed centers of mean-
ing, or binary oppositions. As on other occasions, Derrida borrows the idea from the
structuralists, then elaborates on it by noting that in every such pair one member is
privileged, or favored, over the other. For example, in the binary oppositions of male/
female, good/evil, or truth/lies, the first in each pair is traditionally held by society
to be superior. The privileged member defines itself by what it is not, its less valued
partner. Not only do such oppositions exist among abstractions, but they also under-
lie all human acts. The ideology of a situation or a text can be determined by locat-
ing the binary oppositions in it and noting which are the privileged members.
Poststructuralists test binary oppositions to determine if they are indeed opposed,
to challenge traditional assumptions and beliefs about what should be (and is) privi-
leged, to question where they overlap andon what occasions they share their existence.
The poststructuralists, including those who read from a deconstlUctive perspective,
point out that oppositions are sometimes not so contrasting as they are thought to be.
Perhaps something can be present and absent at the same time. Perhaps, they suggest,
looking at the world'",as a series of opposed centers of meaning-such as right/
wrong, good/evil, its nature. Sl!ch thinking does not take
into account the complexity of the way things are, leading to distortions of the truth.
It requires that we suspend notice of contradictions in our effort to maintain the con-
ventionally accepted arrangement of absolutes. Deconstruction resists such simplifi-
cation by reversing the oppositions, thereby displacing meaning and offering another
set of possibilities of meaning that arise from the new relations of difference.
CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION
predecessor's theory that language is a system based on differences, Derrida goes a
stoep further to point out that any given signifier may point to several different sig-
mfieds. For example, a statement as uncomplicated as "The cherries are in the bowl"
says more than the six words denote. The signifier "cherries" will evoke in our con-
sciousness, and that of our listener/reader, a host of associations-other fruit a still
life, desserts, trees in bloom, allergies, obviously more than cherries in a bowi. Each
?f the signifieds (other fruit, a still life, and so on) in turn becomes a signifier because
It,leads to other associations, other signifieds. In short, a signifier has no single sig-
mfied, or mental concept, as the structuralists assumed but leads instead to a chain of
other signifiers.
, The, seemingly simple explanation of sign = signifier + signified can be com-
m, some other as well. A person can speak ironically, for instance, say-
mg one thmg but meamng another. For example, imagine that you say to someone
who has just run a stop sign and hit your car while driving over the speed limit, "How
could you have run into me? You say you were driving so carefully." Although you
seem to ?e symp,athetic to the other driver, you are actually accusing him of
bemg IrresponSIble behmd the wheel. Tone of voice can be meaningful here too. It
can, by exaggeration, indicate irony, that the opposite of what is said is what is meant.
It may also indica,te a sp.ecially intended meaning behind a statement. By changing
the :,ocal emphaSIS to dIfferent words, you change the meaning. For example, try
readmg the sentence atoud stressing the first use of the word you: "You say
you were dnvmg so carefully." What does the statement imply? It suggests that the
person who caused the accident is being defensive but is alone in claiming innocence.
emphasize the second you and see how the meaning shifts. "You say you were
dr:v:ng so ca:efully" implies that the other driver has accused you of some improper
practlce. And S? meaning slips away, suggesting many meanings, not
a smgle, fixed, clearly IdentIfiable one as the structuralists' principles defined.
Saussure argued that language refers not to objective reality but to mental con-
In terms, it does not even refer to mental concepts but only to
Itself. It conSIsts of the ongoing play of signifiers that never come to rest. Our think-
ing, then, is always in flux, always subject to changing signifiers that move from one
to another. We may wish for stability, but we are caught in language, which refuses
st,ay Such play does produce illusory effects of meanings, but the seeming
are the results of a trace, which consists of what remains from the play
of sIgmfiers. Because we recognize a word by its differences from other words it con-
tinues to have traces of those that it is not. A word (which is present) signals is
absent. This ongoing play Derrida calls dijferance, a deliberately ambiguous coined
term the French words for "to defer" and "to differ," suggesting that
II:eanmg IS leaving in its place only the differences between sig-
mfiers, (Interestmgly, m spoken French dijJerance cannot be distinguished from dif-
ftl'ence, makin.g even more uncertain.) DijJerance asserts that knowledge
comes from dIssImIlanty and absence, making it dynamic and contextual. When
these ideas are applied to a text, the concept of dijJerance makes it impossible to think
PRACTICING DECONSTRUCTION 145
CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION
MAKING A DECONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS 147
One binary opposition of particular importance to Derrida is that of speech/
writing. He objects to the practice of making speech the privileged member, a con-
vention he calls phonocentrism, because it implies that the presence of a speaker
makes communication more direct and accurate. Written words, which are merely
copies of speech, are traditionally deemed to be inferior because they are less directly
connected to the source. Speech is evidence of the presence of the speaker, but writing,
which serves when the speaker is not there, points to absence. The binary emerging
from this situation is presence/absence, with the former, declared through speaking,
the privileged term. This is an essentially logocentric position because it puts the hu-
man being in the center, announcing her presence through language. It asserts pres-
ence (being) through speaking.
If there is no transcendental signified, no objective truth, then such binaries
are not fixed and static. They are fluid, open to change. They can, says Derrida, be re-
versed. Any center can be decentered, thereby providing a new set of values and be-
liefs. At the very least, such a reversal makes it possible to see any given situation
from a newperspective. A bigger assertion is that, by reversing the oppositions-dis-
placing accepted meaning and reinscribing new values-one is able to get outside 10-
gocentric thought. Not only does Derrida reverse the speech/writing binary to see the
terms in a new way, but he actually argues that writing must come before speech.
That is, he reasons that speech is a form of writing. The two share certain features, as
they are both signifying systems. When we interpret oral signs, we must do so by rec-
ognizing a pure form of the signifier, one that can be repeated (and recognized) again
and again despite differences of pronunciation. But being capable of repetition is a
characteristic of writing, whereas speech vanishes into the air. Because the repeatable
signifier gives speech a characteristic of writing, Derrida says it is a special kind of
writing.
Complicating the situation is that binary oppositions may overlap each other.
They are not necessarily discrete entities. There are too many contradictions and as-
sociations involved with language to be able to separate them entirely. At the same
time that they reinforce presence, they also remind us of what is missing, thereby
complementing each other. Derrida refers to the unstable relationship of binary op-
positions as supplementation, suggesting that each of the two terms adds something
to the other and takes the place of the other. In his hands, for example, writing not
only adds something to speech but also substitutes for it, though the substitution is
never exact. It is never precisely what it completes. Supplementation exists in all as-
pects of human life and behavior.
The various ideas traditionally subscribed to by Western civilization are based
on the assumption that conscious, integrated selves are at the center ofihuman activ-
ity. Derrida calls that belief the metaphysics of presence. These ideas include our 10-
gocentrism (ties to words), phonocentrism (ties to words produced as sounds), and
our acceptance of a transcendental signified (ultimate source of all knowledge). In
short, they are beliefs about language and being that have been influential since Plato,
but Derrida challenges them as flawed and erroneous because meaning is, in the
end, undecidable. He defines the metaphysics of presence as "a set of themes whose
character was the sign of a whole set of long-standing constraints" and adds, "These
constraints were practiced at the price of contradictions, of denials, of dogmatic de-
grees. I proposed to analyze the non-closed and fissured system of these constraints
under the name of logocentrism in the form that it takes in Western philosophy." By
deconstructing these constraints, he is trying to open new ways of thinking and know-
ing. In terms of texts, he is giving readers a new way to read.
MAKING A DECONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS
To understand the discussion that follows, you will need to read "Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening, " a poem by Robert Frost, found on page 256.
Whereas a traditional critical reading attempts to establish a meaning for a text, a de-
constructive reading involves asking questions in an effort to show that what the text
claims to be saying and what it is really saying are different. It tries to undermine the
work's implied claim of having coherence, unity, and meaning and to show that it
does not represent the truth of its subject. In fact, no final statement about its mean-
ing can be made, for each reading is provisional, just one in a series of
that decenter each other in ongoing play. In the absence of a transcendental signified,
a text cannot be said to be tied to some center that existed before and outside it, and
meaning can have no place to conclude, nothing in which to be subsumed.
A number of people have tried to summarize the process of deconstructing a text.
Derrida himself explains it by saying that "the reading must always aim at a certain
relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he
does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses." As Sharon Crowley
describes the process, it tries to "tease larger systemic motifs out of gaps, aberrations,
or inconsistencies in a given text." It tries to find blind spots that a writer has absorbed
from cultural systems. She adds that "deconstruction amounts to reading texts in or-
der to rewrite them," as Derrida tries "to reread Western history to give voice to that
which has been systematically silenced." (Paul de Man has perhaps had the most to
say about "blind spots." In Blindness and Insight, he goes so far as to assert that crit-
ics achieve insight through their "peculiar blindness." He finds that they say some-
thing besides what they meant.)
Barbara Johnson's frequently quoted definition of deconstruction says that it
occurs by "the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text it-
self." Jonathan that "to deconstruct a discourse is to show how it under-
mines the philosophy it asserts, or the hierarchical oppositi<?ns on which it relies." A
more detailed comment comes from J. Hillis Miller:
Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation works by a careful and circumspect en-
tering of each textual labyrinth.... The deconstructive critic seeks to find, by this
process of retracing, the element in the system studied which is alogical, the thread
in the text in question which will unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull
down the whole building. The deconstruction, rather, annihilates the ground on
CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION
MAKING A DECONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS 149
which the building stands by showing that the text has already annihilated the
ground, knowingly or unknowingly. Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the struc-
ture of a text but a demonstra,tion that it has already dismantled itself.
The process is actually in some ways similar to the one used in formalism. That
is, the reader engages in a close reading, a very close reading of the text, noting the
presence and operation of all its elements. However, the end is radically different in
the two approaches. Where formalism seeks to demonstrate that a work has essential
unity despite the paradoxes and irony that create its inner tension, that it expresses a
realizable truth, deconstruction seeks to show that a text has no organic unity or ba-
sis for presenting meanings, only a series of conflicting significations.
One way to begin is to follow Derrida's own process, which he calls "double
reading." That is, you first go through a text in a traditional manner, pointing out
,,,,here it seems to have determinate meanings. The first step in deconstructing Frost's
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," for example, might be to make a com-
mentary on the narrator's desire for peace, the highly controlled form, or the cumu-
lative effect of the images of night, winter, and sleep. On second reading, however,
you would look for alternative meanings and use them to negate any specific one.
Discovery of contradictory or incompatible meanings results in the deconstruction of
a text. They undermine the grounds on which it is based, and meaning becomes in-
determinate. The text is not unitary and unified in the manner that logocentrism
promises. Recognizing that a text has multiple interpretations, the reader expects to
interpret it over and over again. No single reading is irrevocable; it can always be dis-
placed by a subsequent one. Thus interpretation becomes a creative act as important
as the text undergoing interpretation. The pleasure lies in the discove11Y of new ways
of seeing the work. Of course, because the reader must express those discoveries in
logocentric language, the interpretation will deconstruct itself as well.
How do you find alternative meanings, especially if you are accustomed to as-
suming that there is an inherent meaning to be found, that it will be recognizable to
other readers, and that the picture it gives of the world will be consondnt with the way
it really is? How do you find contradictory or incompatible meaningsif you are used
to finding the meaning of a text or passage?
You can begin by locating the binary oppositions in the text, identifying the
member that is privileged and the one that is not. In "Stopping by Woods," for ex-
ample, a number of hierarchical oppositions are quickly noted: silence/sound, nature/
civilization, isolation!community, dark/light, stillness/activity, unconscious/con-
scious, and, by implication, death/life and dreams/reality. Looking at them carefully
will give you a way of entering the poem deconstructively. For example, try to answer
the following questions about them, and then compare your answers with the com-
mentary that follows each one.
What values and ideas do the hierarchies reflect? Your answers to the question
will define some of the that influence the way the text is conven-
tionally read.
If you accept the first of each of the paired terms to be the privileged one, you
will read the poem as a statement about the value of experiencing peace, oneness
with nature, acceptance of self. There is beauty in the moment, a sense of con-
nection with primeval forces.
What do you find when you reverse the binary oppositions? What fresh perspec-
tives on the poem emerge? Because the hierarchy is arbitrary and illusory, it can
be turned upside down to provide a new view of the values and beliefs that un-
derlie it, The new, unconventional relationships may radically change yoU/'per-
ception of the terms or of the text.
The interesting aspect of the oppositions in this poem is that the terms that are
privileged throughout most of it are reversed at the end when the traveler chooses
to continue his journey. For the first three stanzas, silence is favored over sound,
nature over civilization, isolation over community, and so on. When, however,
the persona rejects the loveliness of the dark, deep woods and chooses to honor
promises that lie outside them, he acknowledges that he lives in a world that ex-
pects him to renounce self-indulgent dreams and carry out his obligations. He is
part of a society that honors community, activity, consciousness, and reality.
Although in this case the poet himself has provided a reversal, the reader
still must ask what has been changed by it. What else is affected? What would
be different, for example, if the traveler opted for nature, darkness, and dreams?
What if the forces that attracted him so powerfully throughout most of the expe-
rience remained the privileged ones? What would be different if isolation were
deemed to be more attractive than community? What if it were preferable to be
alone, outside the company of friends and family? Then the woods would belong
to nobody, or at least the narrator would not acknowledge their claim, and there
would be no self-consciousness about being observed. Conformity to social
norms and pressures (signaled by the horse) would cease to exist. The world
would be marked by an absence of stress and the presence of peace. The narra-
tor would be liberated from drudgery, labor, the burdens of responsibility that are
implied by the penultimate line. Structure and regimentation would disappear,
and in their place would be spontaneity and natural reactions. And perhaps most
important, one would feel a sense of unity with nature. To be alone is for the mo-
ment appealing, posing as a provisional center of meaning.
Do you find any contradictions in the privileged members? That is, do the
terms silence, isolation, stillness, and unconscious seem consonant? Or are they
incompatible?
The privileged terms initially seem to fit easily into a single scene, but on closer
analysis some incppsistencies emerge. There are contradictions in the poem that
go unacknowledged. For example, the traveler enjoys tpe pleasures of isolation
but ultimately opts for community. He savors the beauty of nature but chooses
civilization. When he continues his journey, isolation and nature are decentered
by corrnnunity and civilization. In the end, contradictory hierarchies (isolation/
community and community/isolation, nature/civilization and civilization/nature)
are privileged by the protagonist even though they are incompatible. The opposed
conditions cannot exist together, though that is never overtly acknowledged in
the poem. Their incongruity underscores the fragmented, conflicted nature of the
CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION
MAKING A DECONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS lSI
traveler himself. It also asserts the lack of fixed, unchanging meaning in poems
or in life itself.
What else do the terms make you think of? What other hierarchies do they lead
to? Such associations will suggest alternative readings, new tenns that can de-
center the ones currently controlling the interpretation.
Earlier it was noted that stillness, silence, isolation, and the rest seemby extension
to suggest the unconscious and death. By establishing unconsciouslconscious
and death/life as major oppositions, the old reading about promises and duties is
decentered and replaced with an interpretation having to do with renunciation of
vitality and presence, a quite different set of concerns. In this way the chain of
signifiers rolls over and over, moving from one provisional meaning to another.
How do the binary terms supplement each other? How does each help the reader
to understand its opposing term? How do they reinforce both presence and
absence?
At the end of Frost's poem, when the narrator exchanges the peace of aloneness
(isolation) for reengagement with the world, then nature and civilization, and
countryside and village, are not opposites, but experiences in the being of the
narrator that decenter and supplement each other. He is attracted by the solace of
the winter scene in the woods, but he chooses the world of obligations and work.
He is not, of course, a unified being but a fragmented one who speaks from the
unconscious and returns at the end to the conscious world. He exists in dream
and reality.
Another deconstructive approach is to take what has heretofore seemed marginal
and make it central. Elements customarily considered to be of minor interest can be-
come the focus of interest, with binary oppositions and possible reversals of their
own. The comment that ordinarily receives little attention is brought to the center to
see what new understandings surface, or a minor character may be scrutinized as crit-
ical to what happens in the plot. For example, in "Stopping by Woods" a close look
at the horse is revealing. Seemingly of slight importance to what happens in the poem
or what it may mean, the horse ,turns out to be surprisingly significant. Described in
this poem as "little" ("My little horse must think it queer / To stop without a farm-
house near"), he turns out to playa large role. He "gives his harness bells a shake,"
thereby reminding the narrator of responsibility, duty, and social judgments. He in-
terrupts the silence with sound, supplanting the peacefulness of the moment with a
call to activity and conformity, replacing absence with presence. The horse becomes,
in a sense, the voice of the conscious and civilized world, which in itself is a com-
mentary on that world. Nevertheless, the traveler exchanges his dreams for reality.
The horse's bells, sounds that are not even language, displace isolation as a center of
meaning and thereby change the direction of the poem. The animal's impact would
easily go unnoticed, except that the deconstructionist moves him to center stage.
Any "hidden" contradictions and discrepancies between what the text seems to
say and what it actually says are important. Such incongruities are often found in
what is not said, in gaps of information, silences, questions, or sometimes figures of
speech. The author's intent is of no help in this process because what the author thinks
was said may not be the case at all. In fact, by identifying those places where a slip
of language occurs, that is, where something is said that was not meant to be said, you
have found a point at which a text begins to deconstruct itself. By discovering a pat-
tern of such inconsistencies and trying to account for it, a different interpretation be-
comes possible. The reader of this poem wonders, for instance, about the distance
between the terms used to describe the woods. They are said to be "lovely, dark, and
deep." The first descriptive word connotes aesthetic pleasure, the next two a sense of
threat or mystery. The solace that the narrator imputes to the woods is threatened. It
is, finally, not there, or at least is there only momentarily. The woods have no perma-
nent, stable, consistent self.
Looking at a binary opposition-such as presence/absence, for example, re-
versed by Derrida so that absence is favored-often helps a reader to deconstruct
a text. In "Stopping by Woods," it is significant that the narrator's words come un-
spoken from the inner self. They appear to exist only in thought. Phonocentric views
would give them a privileged position because they are closest to the man. They rep-
resent him, stand in for him, displace him. The inner words ultimately appear in writ-
ing, however, displacing speech (which in this case is unvoiced), which- displaced
unspoken thought, which initially displaced the man. The presence of being ,is far re-
moved. The words of the persona are supplements (additions to and substitutions for)
him. Further, the bells of the horse metaphorically make the horse a spokesperson for
the community, thereby displacing its center. Sound has replaced speech. Animal has
replaced people. Absence is thereby privileged over presence.
In sum, the narrator of "Stopping by Woods" is seen to be a logocentric being
who looks for a center where there is none. Finding only momentary meaning, he
moves on to seek a center in work and community. He yearns for peace but displaces
it with obligations, because although unity is desirable, it is absent, only fleetingly
available in the moment in the woods.
Finally, the deconstructive reader will place all structures in question, because
an ultimate meaning is always deferred, and ambiguity remains. The purpose is to
decenter each new center, to cast doubt on previous theories, never coming to rest on
anyone meaning but generating an infinite number of possible interpretations. The
meaning of the protagonist's experience in "Stopping by Woods," for example, can-
not in the long run be determined. The repetition of the last line resists interpretation
or provides multiple readings, because its metaphoric ramifications remain ambigu-
ous, unclear, full of possibilities, none of them final.
On subsequent re,adings, new levels of meaning will emerge with the inversion
of other binary oppositions. Some will appear only after qthers have been explored.
You may find yourself moving back and forth between different interpretations or
successively displacing one with another. In either case, the unending play of diffe-
rance prevents you from arriving at any decidable meaning, or any set of multiple
meanings, for anything you say or write. Instead, there is an unending process, with
every new reading holding the possibility of a new interpretation. Acceptance of
shifting meanings challenges the previously held views of the reader, offering her
CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION
WRITING A DECONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS I53
freedom from the constraints of traditional assumptions and ideologies so that new
ways of seeing are made possible.
WRITING A DECONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS
It should be noted at the outset that important voices have expressed concern about
~ appropriateness of viewing deconstruction as a critical approach. Not surpris-
mgly, some critics resist what they see as the negativism found in its philosophical
attack on the existence of meaning in literature (and life). Others object less to its
destructive effects than to what they see as its tendency to trivialize literature and the
act of reading, thereby threatening the privileged place they hold in academia. They
accuse it of diminishing our capacity to appreciate and interpret literature. And al-
most everyone complains of its obscure and confusing terminology. David Hirsch's
The Deconstruction of Literature, John Ellis's Against Deconstruction, and David
Lehman's Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, for ex-
ample, all question the validity of this approach.
Another kind of objection comes from Jane Tompkins, who argues against the
practice of applying deconstructive principles to texts because it means using meth-
ods that are basically positivist and empirical and thereby contradictory to decon-
struction. She writes,
The point I want to make here IS that you can't apply post-structuralism to literary
texts. Why not? Because to talk about applying post-structuralism to literary texts
assumes the following things: (1) that we have freestanding sUbjects, (2) that we
have freestanding objects of investigation, (3) that there are freestanding methods,
and (4) that what results when we apply reader to method and method to text is a
freestanding interpretation. This series of assumptions revokes everything that Der-
rida is getting at in "D(f!erance, " and that is implicit in Saussure's theory of lan-
guage.... As we read literary texts, then, "we" are not applying a "method"; we are
acting as an extension of the intetpretive code, of those systems of difference that
constitute us and the objects of our perception simultaneously.
Nevertheless, deconstructive readings can enrich one's experience with a text by
providing an ongoing journey through it, each revealing a new way of thinking about
it. Such studies proceed in different ways, but here are some suggestions to help you
read from this perspective and write about your observations.
PREWRITING
A reading log can be particularly helpful with the deconstructive approach. As you
go through a text for the first time, you can make notes as a formalist would, tak-
ing an interest in how meaning grows out of its various stylistic elements. You will
identify tensions (in the form of paradox and irony) and be aware of how they are
resolved. You will take note of how images, figurative language, and symbols come
L
together to make a unified whole (see chapter 3). During the second reading, you can
set aside your willingness to accept that there is an identifiable, stable meaning pro-
duced by the diction, imagery, symbols, and the rest and begin to probe unresolved,
unexplained, or unmentioned matters. In your reading log you should record the
undeveloped concerns that would, if they were explored, intenupt the assumed unity
and meaning of the text.
The prewriting stage is also a good time to play with the binary oppositions that
you find, first identifying those that initially seemmost significant, then inferring the
ideology that they present. The next step, as noted above in "Making a DeconstlUc-
tive Analysis," is to reverse them, look for contradictions in them, and determine how
they supplement each other. It is likely that this process will help you to find, in the
terms of J. Hillis Miller, "the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all,
or the loose stone which will pull down the whole building."
Another prewriting activity involves examining the figurative language of the
text. By making a list of metaphors, for example, you have information that may re-
veal slippages of the language. Because figures of speech do not mean what they say,
there is room for them to misstate what the author intended for them to say. You may
find it helpful to put them on paper and, in writing, to play with their possibilities.
Much of the prewriting suggested here involves listing and note making. These
strategies will aid analysis, but they will be helpful in the drafting stage only insofar
as they provide ideas and information. Consequently, the more material you can gen-
erate at this point, the better off you will be when you begin to write.
DRAFTING AND REVISING
The Introduction
Given that deconstructive readings seek to displace previous ones, and sometimes to
decenter standard, generally accepted interpretations, one way to open the discussion
is to reiterate the conventional reading of a text. In other words, the introduction may
simply be a restatement of the usual perception of what a work means or of how it
operates, because by explaining how a story is usually read or how a character is nor-
mally perceived tobe, you have a basis for deconstructing those views. Once you have
established what is usually deemed to be so, you are set to state why it is not the only
possible reading. Your argument for multiple readings will be the central focus of the
body of the discussion that follows, but it is helpful to introduce that idea early on.
The Body
Your purpose in the body of your deconstructive analysis will be to demonstrate the
limited perspective of the conventional reading. You may want to show how the ide-
ology that the text tries to support is not supportable, an approach that is popular with
Marxist and feminist deconstlUctive critics. In this case, as you study a particular text,
154 CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION
GLOSSARY OF TERMS USEFUL IN UNDERSTANDING DECONSTRUCTION
ISS
you .will also be the larger contexts in which it exists: You will be sug-
or overtly statmg, that the order supported by it is also open to question, per-
haps Itself fraught with inconsistencies and illusory stability.
.On the other hand, you may be more interested in presenting a series of possible
o.ne decentering the other in an ongoing process. This approach will take
dIscuSSIOn a step further by showing how meaning is not simply an either-or situ-
but unending series of possibilities, leaving meaning ultimately beyond de-
cIdmg. In case, you will want to demonstrate how and where the text falls apart
because of Its own inconsistencies, misstatements, or contradictions.
The thinking you did during the prewriting stage will be valuable here, but re-
member that all assertions will need to be supported with quotations and examples
the text. The following questions can help you generate the basis of your
dIscuSSIOn. If you developed yNlf prewriting stage thoroughly, you will have already
covered some of them.
'" What is the primary binary opposition in the text?
'" What associated binary oppositions do you find?
'" vVhich terms in the oppositions are privileged?
'" What elements in the work support the privileged terms?
'" What statement of values or belief emerges from the privileged terms?
'" What elements in the text contradict the hierarchies as presented?
'" Where is the statement of values or belief contradicted by characters, events, or
statements in the text?
.. Are the privileged terms inconsistent? Do they present conflicting meanings?
+ What. associations 'you have with the terms that complicate their opposition?
That IS, what aSSOCIatIOns keep you from accepting that the terms are all good or
all bad?
'" What new possibilities of understanding emerge when you reverse the binary
oppositions?
'" How does the reversal of oppositions tear down the intended statement of meaning?
.. What contradictions of language, image, or event do you notice?
'" Are there any significant omissions of information?
'" Can you identify any irreconcilable views offered as coherent systems?
.. What is left unnoticed or unexplained?
+ How would a focus on different binary oppositions lead to a different
interpretation?
'" Where are the figures of speech so ambiguous that they suggest several (and per-
haps contradictory) meanings?
'" What usually overlooked minor figures or events can be major ones?
'" How does the focus of meaning shift when you make marginal figrtres central?
'" What new vision of the situation presented by the text emerges for you?
.$ What new complications do you see that the conventional reading would have
"smoothed over"?
'" Why can you not make a definitive statement about the meaning of the text?
The Conclusion
If you have begun by rehearsing the conventional reading of the text under
an effective way to end your essay is by making a comparison of that understandmg
and your deconstructive analysis, pointing out why the earlier one is not definitive. If
you prefer, you may reiterate the several different ways in which the text can be
thereby making the point that meaning is always provisional, always ready to gIVe
way to other meaning.
..++
+
GLOSSARY OF TERMS USEFUL IN
UNDERSTANDING DECONSTRUCTION
Binary oppositions Dichotomies that are actually evaluative hierarchies. They underlie hu-
man acts and practices.
Diachronic A term used to describe an approach to the study of language that traces how
and why words have evolved in meaning or sound over time. . . .
Dijferance The term Derrida uses to indicate that meaning is based on differences, IS always
postponed, and is ultimately undecidable. .
Langue The structure of a language that is used by all members of a particular language
community. . .,.
Logocentrism The belief in an absolute or foundation that grounds the lmgUlstic systemand
fixes the meaning of a spoken or written utterance.
Metaphysics of presence Beliefs including binary oppositions, logocentrism, and phono-
centrism that have been the basis of Western philosophy since Plato.
Modernism A term used in a limited sense to designate the distinctive concepts and forms
of literature and art since World War I (1914-1918) and used in a more general sense since
the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to designate concepts and characterized
by a belief in science and the use of reason to solve the problems of humankmd.
Parole A specific use of langue.
Phenomenology The philosophical perspective that assumes that a thinking subject and the
object of which it is aware are inseparable. The Geneva critics, -who read a text as the c.on-
sciousness of an author put into words, are often described as practicing phenomenological
criticism.
Phonocentrism The belief that speech is privileged over writing.
Poststructuralism Theories (including deconstruction, new historicism, and neo-Freudian
theory) that are based on Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic concepts but at the same time
undermine them. ..y"
Sign The combination of a signifier and a signified.
Signified The concept of meaning indicated by a signifier.
Signifier A conventional sound utterance or written . .
Semiology A science proposed by Saussure that would mvestlgate meamng through signs
observable in cultural phenomena. . .
Structuralism A science that seeks to understand how systems work. Those who practice It
try to describe the underlying (and not necessarily visible) principles by which systems exist.
Who Wants a Doughnut without a Hole? Deconstructive Criticism and
the Failure of Meaning in Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh"
Matt Dube
Many American short stories in the realist mode pursue the same narrative goal. In
these stories, the narrator sets out to discover how his life is being ruined and to under-
stand why. Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh" (1982) is written in the realist mode and can be
read as just this sort of domestic mystery. Leroy Moffitt has returned to living at home af
tel' years of driving a truck to discover his marriage is in trouble. He attempts to discover
why his marriage is falling apart and then begin to repair it. Leroy discovers that his marital
troubles began when his child, Randy, died from sudden infant death syndrome. This revela-
tion, represented by the longest flashback in the story, falls somewhere beyond the halfway
mark, where meaning in realistic stories is often disclosed. From there, Leroy and his wife,
Norma Jean, go for a weekend to the Civil War battleground at Shiloh, and Leroy fights to
save his marriage.
The deconstructive interpretive approach is informed by the same search for a cen
tral structuring incident, like the death of Randy in "Shiloh." The deconstructive critic is in-
terested in locating the center of the story to understand how the story structures its own
meaning. Traditionally, the deconstructive critic then moves to a study of the margins of the
story, to prove that there is not a single central site for meaning. However, there is a sepa-
rate tradition in deconstructive criticism, one inaugurated by Jacques Derrida in his essay-
lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Natural Sciences" (1970). In the
essay, Derrida proposes a model whereby he is able to neutralize the center itself. He
notes that the incest taboo, represented by Claude Levy-Strauss as the universal center
of all societies, regardless of local differences, is itself a site for mutually destructive contra
dictions. By invalidating the meaning center of the cultural systems, Derrida opens the cui
tures, and the study of them by social scientists, to the possibility of locating contingent
meaning anywhere at all. "Shiloh" is engaged in a similar deconstructive critique of how
the realist mode of American fiction creates meaning.
The flashback to the death of Randy, Leroy and Norma Jean's baby, is the single longest
sustained flashback in'othe story, follOWing as it does on the heels of Leroy's encounter with
Stevie, his pot dealer. The flashback itself fills a lengthy paragrllph, or rather doesn't fill it,
for the memory of Randy is crowded out by the memory of the film that Norma Jean and
Leroy were watching when Randy died, Dr. Strange/ave. The flashback is motivated by and
follows up a hint dropped earlier in the story, that Leroy and Norma Jean "had a child who
died as an infant, years ago." That same passage continues to say this made the couple "feel
CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION
The unstable relationship between two binary oppositions that keeps themfrom
bemg totally separate entities.
Synchronic. term used to describe an approach to the study of language that searches
:01' .the prmclples that govern its functions by examining a language at one particular point
m tllne.
The illusory effect of mr:aning that is left in a signifier by other signifiers, that is what
It IS not.
'
Transcendental signified A fixed, ultimate center of meaning.
RECOMMENDED WEB SITES

. issues of interest to teachers who want to integrate postmodern themes into
theIr Called the Teacher's Guide to Postmodernism, it provides understandable ex-
planatIOns of complex concepts.
http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/Faculty/structuralism.html
A o:erview of structuralism, with applications to classical literature. It includes an
annotated bIblIography of works of major figures of the movement.
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.htm1
Survey of major criticismof semiotics, entitled Semiotics for Beginners.
http://www.130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Derrida.html
An introduction to the basic concepts of Derrida. It also provides definitions of tenns
commonly used in discussions of deconstruction.
SUGGESTED READING
Abrams, M. H. The Deconstructive Angel. Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 425-438.
CroWley, Sharon. A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction. Urbana, Ill.: National Council
of Teachers of English, 1989.
Culler, Jonathan: On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell Umv. Press, 1982.
Derrida, Jacques. Living On: Border Lines. In Deconstruction and Criticism. Harold Bloom
Paul.De Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. New York;
Contmuum, 1980.
---. OfGrammatology. Trans. Gayatri Sival. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998.
Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading.
BaltImore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980.
Miller, J. Hillis. Tradition and Difference. Diacritics 2.4 (1972): 6-13.
Robert. Deconstruction and Criticism. Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 278-295.
Tompkms, !ane. A Short Course in Post-Structuralism. In Conversations, ed. Charles Moran
and ElIzabeth Penfield, pp. 19-37. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English
1990.
'
MODEL STUDENT ANALYSIS
MODEL STUDENT ANALYSIS
157
CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION MODEL STUDENT ANALYSIS 159
awkward around one another," and more ominous still, "Leroy has read that for most peo-
ple losing a child destroys a marriage." These concrete, factual comments have a certain
authentic quality (despite, or perhaps because of, Leroy's admission that he can't place
whether he read this somewhere or simply heard it on Donahue) that contrasts sharply
with Leroy's feeling that he and his wife "are waking up out of a dream together." Mason
suggests that it was the awkwardness over the death of their child that led Leroy to begin
his life as a trucker. Now that an injury has forced him to abandon that career, he realizes
that Randy's death has changed his relationship with Norma Jean, breaking it into periods
before and after the tragedy. Since Randy died and Leroy began driving a big rig, he and
his wife had talked little, but now that he is at home full-time, they are talking again. The
struggle of the story, and of Leroy in his marriage, is to recuperate from the event of
Randy's death, to exorcize Randy's spirit from the relationship the child haunts.
As much as the introductory sections of the story work to re-create the chronology
of Leroy and Norma Jean's marriage and to posit Randy's death as the incident that caused
the rupture that must be repaired, the flashback itself works to undo this comfortable
sense of narrative meaning. In fact, when Randy is reintroduced into the story, it is through
a chain of association, with Stevie, Leroy's dealer and the son of a prominent local doctor.
Leroy says that Randy "would be about Stevie's age now," a statement that suggests an even
closer similarity: that Randy would likely be just as delinquent, as ungrateful,. and as brusque
as Stevie, just as unlikely to help save Leroy's failing marriage. When Randy actually dies,
Leroy and Norma Jean are watching Dr. Strange/ave at the drive-in (one half of a double fea-
ture, of which they are unable to see the prophetically titled second half, Lover, Come Back,
which in part is the narrative of "Shiloh"). Dead, Randy moves qUickly from being a baby
to being "a large doll" offered as "a present" and then "a sack of flour." Leroy himself can
barely remember Randy, though it is easy for him to remember scenes from Dr. Strange/ave.
Randy is pronounced the victim of sudden infant death syndrome, a diagnosis reworded at
the end of the flashback paragraph to become "crib death." This shift in diction mirrors a
similar shift taking place with what has happened to Randy. First, a nurse says "It just hap-
pens sometimes," but later Leroy learns that "crib death is caused by a virus." Randy is
completely written over, by his father's memories of the movie president, played by Peter
Sellers, in the War Room; by SteVie, who could have been his classmate or even Randy him-
self; and by the doctor's shifting diagnosis. Finally, he is written over by the wording of the
text itself: in both flashback and present day scenes, Randy is more often referred to as
"the baby" than by his given name.
The story makes another move to displace Randy further from the central location he
might hold in Leroy's catalog of failure and loss, and this final erasure is effected by substitu-
tion. Randy comes to be replaced by Shiloh, the Civil War battleground. Clearly, Mason
means to riff on another way of reading "civil war," standing in for the conflict between
Leroy and Norma Jean. But in the story, Shiloh itself takes on a significant and different
meaning. Leroy's promise to build Norma Jean a house is synchronically displaced by the
promise Norma jean's mother, Mabel, made to return to Shiloh. The two frustrated desires
merge in a shift that signals the beginning of the end of the story and identifies the trip as
the solution to the larger problem of domestic grief. Mabel gives the trip further resonance
by referring to it as a second honeymoon, recognizing in it an obvious attempt to fix a failed
marriage. Norma Jean is shocked by her mother's choice of words, but she shouldn't be,
because it comes from the same vocabulary her husband uses, that of daytime TV talk
shows like Donahue.
Leroy and Norma jean's trip is not a successful one. As the story ends, Norma Jean
has announced that she is leaving Leroy. He watches her walk away from him across the'
site of the battle where "General Grant ... shoved the Southerners back to Corinth,
where Mabel and Jet Beasley were married years later." Leroy's story circles back geo-
graphically, but its narrative line is finally straightforward and unbroken. Mason writes,
"Leroy knows he is leaving out a lot," but in a story that is motivated by synchrohic dis-
placement, as this one is, attempts to reconnect the signifier and signified necessarily fore-
ground absence.
Bobbie Ann Mason is most often read, and rightly so, as part of an American realist
movement that was the dominant mode for American short fiction in the 1980s. In this, she
fits neatly beside writers like Raymond Carver and the literary "brat pack" of Jay Mciner-
ney, Brett Easton Ellis, and Tama JanOWitz. However, the realist mode does not necessarily
preclude a deconstructive reading of the story, as I think I have shown here. Realist fiction
is in fact closely tied to cultural anthropology: both try to re-create a recognizable culture
through the deployment of artifacts and rituals. As Derrida showed in "Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Natural Sciences," such a system is particularly open to decon-
structive techniques. The way Mason deconstructs the extended flashback, which could
preViously be read as a likely source for meaning in the story, does not mean that her story
lacks all meaning or any appeal to the reader. Rather, it changes the stakes of what that
story signifies and how we might respond to it.
The successful deconstruction of the central site of meaning, which here is the death
of Norma Jean and LEl,fPy's child, does not toss the story into the realm of unrecoverable
metafiction, nor o e ~ it lessen the realism of the story. What i! does, in fact, is to deepen
the pathos of our response to Leroy's situation. There is nothing to lead us to believe that
"reality" as represented in fiction must have meaning; in fact, such meanings often make
the stories differ from the reader's own life experiences. In "Shiloh," Mason has used a de-
constructive critique to neutralize the form of the realist story that imposes the kind of
160 CHAPTER 8 DECONSTRUCTION
,narrative meaning we rarely find in our lives. In the place of any central meaning, Mason
Instead the reader many possible alternate sites of meaning, all contingent on the pop
culture In which her characters live. We can choose the contingent meaning of Dr. Strange-
love or Wonder Woman, of Civil War history or Donahue. Mason has set the realist short
story free from its need to structure all the events of its narrative into a univalent scheme
for meaning. For the deconstructive critic, this is a liberation to be celebrated. For Leroy
the loss of central meaning doesn't change the fact that his wife has walked away; it
simply means that he will never know the reason why.
9
CULTURAL STUDIES: NEW HISTORICISM
The essential matter of history is not what happened but
what people thought or said about it.
FREDERIC W. MAITLAND, English writer on law
As we noted with feminist and other critical approaches, the more recent appear-
ance of a particular perspective, the more difficult it is to define. The field of cultural
studies is a prime example of the problem. Emerging in the 1960s, it has yet to settle
into an accepted and agreed-upon set of principles and practices. In it you will recog-
nize many theories that you have already met, ideas drawn from Marxism, feminism,
popular culture, racial and ethnic studies, and more. It is not a single, standardized
approach to literature (or anything else) but a field that binds its adherents together
through some common interests and purposes, although they are addressed in widely
divergent ways.
At present, three types of cultural studies that are getting particular notice are
new historicism, postcolonialism, and American multiculturalism. Although each
has its own distinct focus, they are all concerned with social and cultural forces that
create a community or that threaten it. Those who look at texts from these points of
view are eager to make more voices recognized by a broader circle of readers. In the
long run, their approaches to reading can change the way readers conceive of a cul-
ture. Because cultural studies is still finding its way, this discussion will identify only
a few commonalities that are shared by its different subgroups.
AN OV'ERVIEW OF STUDIES
Part of the difficulty in defining cultural studies, or even culture for that matter, is
that the terms are so inclusive. If culture refers to the sum of the beliefs, institutions,
arts, and behaviors of a particular people or time, cultural studies can be said to ad-
dress an almost unthinkably broad body of knowledge: language, customs, legal sys-
tem, literature, and more. Sometimes such a study is even interested in the culture of
those who have responded to it. As it usually proceeds, however, a cultural study will
161